This summer I’m trying to get my kids to do a bit of reading and writing everyday. The reading bit is no problem–I have a heathy addiction to the library. But I wasn’t sure what I could do for writing practice.

Turns out my children love worksheets, or in internet speak, printables. I am not a teacher and have no idea what my kids officially need, but I know what they like. They are engaged and putting pencil to paper. I think that is good enough for summertime.

I started a printables board on pinterest to keep track of the good ones I come across. Here are the ones that we keep coming back to:

for my 3 year old: You can customize this printable to say whatever you like. He’s just starting to learn how to write his name, so I plug that in most of the time and he loves it. The day I plug in P O O P to that worksheet is the day I become the funniest mother in the entire world.

for my 6 year old: This is not the most exciting printable, but it is my six year old’s favorite. There is a space on top for drawing or pasting a picture and enough room on the bottom for a super short story.

for my 7 year old: My daughter loves to read, but sometimes she reads so fast I’m not sure the all words have time to reach her brain. So I’ve started giving her book report sheets to fill out. She likes the ones where you get to draw a picture. I like these printable book reports that focus on separate things: one for characters, one for researching the author, there is even one for writing a new ending!

I’ve only just scratched the surface, I’m sure. If you have any suggestions for writing work or cool printables you’ve found–please share! My kids will thank you!

Now that it’s officially summer, elsie marley is officially in summer mode. Like last year, I’m going to keep a simple summer journal. Post will be a bit shorter, a bit slap dash, just a peek into our summer days really.

If you like the idea of a simple, summertime blog I would love it if you played along! If you have a blog, use summer journal as your title. If you are more of an instgramer/twitterer/tumblrer type use the #summmerjournal hashtag. Leave a comment if you’d like to play along, so I can follow your summer journal!

The other afternoon, we played a game of Simon Says, Draw! Jean from the Artful Parent, posted about this game years ago and I’ve been meaning to try it ever since.  It’s just like the Simon Says game you played when you were little only with drawing instead. So Simon says things like:

• draw a dot
• use a blue crayon
• draw a squiggle
• pass your marker to the left
• draw three eyes
• draw seven legs
• color something purple
• color with two markers at the same time (this one was a bit hit)

You can say Simon says at the beginning of the sentence or not. That part of the game got lost and we just had fun telling each other what to draw. Everyone’s picture ends up completely different. And it’s a great game to wake up your creativity on a hot summer afternoon.

I took this picture last year right before the kids got home. They were so excited to bust through the finish line! Woo Hoo! Summertime!

We also made a GIANT list of all the fun things we wanted to do that summer. I’m happy to say we checked off almost every one (I don’t think there were any pony rides, but hey! they’re expensive).

This summer, I’m inspired by this post about getting summer right.  Having a schedule–albeit a loosey goosey summer one–is key to keeping my sanity in the summer. I really like the idea of having a set amount of time everyday dedicated to a specific task: say 20 minutes reading, 20 minutes writing, 30 minutes chores, 20 minutes working toward their summer goal.

My idea is to make a summer passport–inspired by the restaurant passport above (hmm, that link seems to be broken, but you get the idea). We’ll make some little books together and write down all the tasks we want/need to accomplish all summer in them. Then I’m going to go out and purchase one of those handy dandy date stampers–you know, the ones the librarians used to stamp your book?  And I’ll stamp their passport when they finish the tasks.

Does this sound too complicated? Last year our summer was filled with fun stuff and my kids’ definitely learned some things too. But this summer I want them to see how a little time each day adds up to awesome things.  Oh my, I think KCW has taken over my brain!